"Tags" or Classes

Hello! I was wondering if the use of "tags" to track certain projects or customer transactions within Wave has ever been discussed or considered.

Short of (i) going with a full-blown Class or Project Tracking system (similar to what QB uses); or (ii) having the ability to assign accounts other than Income to bills and invoices (assign pre-paid invoice items or pass-through expenses to a liability account instead of income), it would definitely be helpful to apply a tag to any transaction. I could then view all transactions with that have that specific tag...either income or expense.

Don't expect the complexity of Classes or Project Tracking, but use of tags seems like a relatively simple fix to an issue I've seen discussed here many times.

Comments

I'd love to hear more about the kind of impact that would have your business! Can you tell us what field you work in and share a real-world example of how you'd use a feature like this one in the context of your business? We're always looking to better understand the needs of our users, and the best way you can help us see the impact a feature like this one would have is to tell us more about how your business works.

We are a small but growing baseball academy that will be managing multiple teams, leagues, tournaments, and individual players.

One big example of where we would utilize tags is in tracking & reporting income/expenses associated with a specific tournament or league. We may have multiple expenses (umpire fees, equipment purchases, field rental costs) that are incurred over multiple tournaments or leagues. A tag would allow me to easily review the expenses for a specific tournament without having to bog down the chart of accounts with event-specific expense/income accounts.

Tags would also be a back-door way (in the absence of project tracking or classes) for me to "earmark" income and track associated expenses without having to make multiple journal entries into and out of a short term liability account.

For example, if I make multiple deposits under a "Sponsorships" income account, I could apply a specific tag for each team and easily see how many sponsorship dollars that team has available. Then as the team has expenses those sponsorship dollars are intended to pay for, I apply the same tag to keep a running balance. It could all be done at the invoice/receipt/bill stage with a simple "tag" field.

Ideally we would have a class system or project tracking, but I definitely don't expect that in a free product. I just figured tags would be a simple workaround that would benefit your users. It wouldn't have an impact on the actual accounting, but it would be hugely helpful in dialing in reporting.

Hi Alexia, tags will also help my business. Our main business is e-commerce but we also sell products to companies by project, tag would help us to track expenses for specific projects. I believe this would be a great feauture.

I agree - tags would be great. I use tags in my project management tool, asana, and they allow me to be able to view associated tasks, which span multiple projects, at a glance. I sell kite making kits, to different kinds of customers, and it would be useful to be able to display my invoices/sales by product type/customer type/event type they were used for - lots of things. It would also be good to be able to customise the dashboard to show sales by product type/tag - unless you can already do this? Thanks :-) p.s iv'e only been using wave a week so I'm a total newbie!

@Jenny_kitekids, huge welcome to Wave! I hope you're enjoying using our platform thus far! There are no reports by product on Wave at this time, but you can get around this by assigning unique income accounts to each product you sell and relying on the Account Transactions report for the same information. It's very much a workaround and is a bit of work to set up, but it might still help! With that said, I'll be sure to pass on your feedback.

As an self-employed contractor, some form of 'tagging' of transactions to allow a degree of project tracking is, for me, the one crucial feature missing from Wave at the moment.

A few years back I rejected Wave for my accounting needs because it was missing then. It's a real shame to find that's still the case now, but nevertheless since I love Wave's simplicity I've recently decided to give it another go in spite of this. I was just so disappointed to find that tagging hadn't been added in the intervening period.

Incidentally, my partner also has her own small business & loves Wave too. But again, she also would like some method of tracking expenses related to the different projects she runs. I understand it maybe not a core Accounting function, but it does make planning & managing business finances just so much easier to do day to day.

I would use tagging to identify different rental properties. I'd like to answer questions like "Is 123 Main profitable?" or "How much HOA am I paying for at 123 Main?" The alternative is to create a duplicate Chart of Accounts for each property/project/account but that's brittle. Imagine HOA:123 Main or 123 Main:HOA and how much work it would be to add/remove/manage that Chart. Instead, I could run a report as "Balance Sheet where the tag = 123 Main". See Gmail/Google Docs as a good implementation of tagging and the accompanying search.

Yes! I would love tags as well. I have a company that creates SaaS apps and tags would allow me to track income/expenses by product. Creating separate accounts in the Chart of Accounts would be a pain to manage.

@kacit@twestrick@pyba@shawnthompsonllc@Jenny_kitekids@jalop123j@PBrooksMac I'd like to thank you all for participating in this conversation. We're listening very carefully to this feedback. Truth be told, we've explored this in the past but chosen not to move forward, but it seems the time has to come to revisit as a product group and see if it now makes more sense for our users in 2019. No promises, but we hear your need loudly.

@PBrooksMac I also would like to respond to one comment in this thread: "Ideally we would have a class system or project tracking, but I definitely don't expect that in a free product". We're committed to you, and every other Wave user. We will never neglect your collective needs by being the "free product". Free is part of our ethos because we believe in helping every entrepreneurs around the world increase their odds of success by having the right tools to run their business without unnecessary overhead. For North American users, when they need financial services to get paid faster, pay their employees, or smooth out their cash flow, we're there to help should they entrust us with solving those needs. That's how we earn revenue. We'll never use free as an excuse, and you should always hold us to a high standard.

Thanks so much for being such wonderful users. To all new readers: please keep the comments pouring in. We're listening.

Yes, project tracking is a SUPER basic requirement for any business financial software, as ideally anyone in a service-based business has repeat clients who they are doing different projects for. Can't believe this hasn't been implemented yet. It's also been publicized in articles as a major weakness of waze, so I would think for that reason alone you would add the feature. (here's one example: https://www.merchantmaverick.com/best-wave-alternatives/)

@Mani I hope the decision was made to add this feature. It's actually a requirement for running a Series LLC. We must have a way to classify/tag/categorize between the various cells/series of the Parent LLC. Without this feature, all the Series/Cells money is mixed with no way to track, which increases the likelihood of a law suit "piercing" the separate Cells and being treated as one entity, thereby defeating the purpose of the Series LLC.

Yeah this would be great, we run a theatre club and have various shows through the year, where we categorise our expenses (props, set, costumes) etc., and it would be fantastic to have a tag, so we could run reports against each production.

@Mani - Thanks for revisiting the ability to add tags/classes to Waves Apps. Waves is a great growing tool with many good features, yet having the ability to segment certain types of expenses, will facilitate reporting as well as the ability to better manage many of the invoices (either in progress/paid) on a dashboard. Thanks for all you guys do.

@Mani -- I second / 99 this, ;-) . Thanks for evaluating a tagging protocol on the dev roadmap.

It would add a lot of value to many different kinds of SBs.

I know it adds lots of complexity to traditional ERP's and Accounting Software if you go the full class / cost accounting route, but I bet if you simply set it up as an "additional field" or tagging feature, and then over-time incorporated the ability to add those same custom fields to reports as a slice/filter, it wouldn't take much time/UAT to roll something basic out.

If you guys ever want some extra input ;-), I'm a retired CFO and used to oversee the tech roadmaps for Amazon.com's Global Financial Systems.

Have been watching and testing Wave for years now and I'm absolutely astonished at the unwillingness to add a tagging feature. Friken Mint has tagging. This can't be taken as a serious functional accounting system without it. So sad, I could refer 1000's of clients to this app if they just added it. Come on guys, be transparent, communicate your roadmap, make it happen already.

To be completely transparent, our accounting product & engineering teams are currently focused on moving customers from our older version of the accounting platform to our new version launched last year. This effort has been a long push for us because of the complexity of accounting. When completed, our new platform unlocks the team's capability to build features like tagging much much easier.

As Mani has spoken about above, we appreciate tagging transactions to projects, productions, office locations, etc. At this point in time we have not prioritized this functionality to be worked on in the next 6 months. Our product roadmap changes as more signal comes into our teams, so I highly encourage customers to continue their advocacy for this feature.

Absolutely need tags/some sort of labeling as a feature. Tags simply represent categorization - an essential element to nearly every part of business. There's no place in your Customers area to see notes about the customer.

I've been through every accounting software out there and was excited to find Wave, until now. I was using zipbooks $35/mo (ripoff) plan JUST to have tags, and am actually considering going back because otherwise I'm going to have to manually sort through a spreadsheet to filter through my customers.

The only way to label which customer is which (I have clients in different industries I absolutely need to filter) is to add a keyword to the beginning of their name, which isn't a great solution for a modern day SaaS.

@Mani said:@kacit@twestrick@pyba@shawnthompsonllc@Jenny_kitekids@jalop123j@PBrooksMac I'd like to thank you all for participating in this conversation. We're listening very carefully to this feedback. Truth be told, we've explored this in the past but chosen not to move forward, but it seems the time has to come to revisit as a product group and see if it now makes more sense for our users in 2019. No promises, but we hear your need loudly.

@PBrooksMac I also would like to respond to one comment in this thread: "Ideally we would have a class system or project tracking, but I definitely don't expect that in a free product". We're committed to you, and every other Wave user. We will never neglect your collective needs by being the "free product". Free is part of our ethos because we believe in helping every entrepreneurs around the world increase their odds of success by having the right tools to run their business without unnecessary overhead. For North American users, when they need financial services to get paid faster, pay their employees, or smooth out their cash flow, we're there to help should they entrust us with solving those needs. That's how we earn revenue. We'll never use free as an excuse, and you should always hold us to a high standard.

Thanks so much for being such wonderful users. To all new readers: please keep the comments pouring in. We're listening.

You heard them loudly, can you update us on the tag development ? I also relly need this system. For me being able to set tags on my invoices would be a basic but essential feature that would save me so much time.

I agree - tags & classes is an essential feature. Everyone I know that has used tags in the past swears by it. Google now has tags for pretty much most of its ecosystem. I would also recommend 100's of clients to waveapps if it had tags.

We often run functions and activities and the ability to allocate revenue and expenses to each function or activity is something I currently have to track manually in Excel. It wasn't to bad when we had only two/three functions per year, now we have at least one 10-15 functions per year and growing. It has got to the point where I need to consider an alternative accounting solution. It is such a shame as Wave has been at the foundation of our lives since the beginning.

I've been happily using Wave for two years now, but unfortunately without the ability to track Income/Expense on a project basis we are at the point where Wave has become more of a hindrance than a help.

For our monthly and annual reporting I'm now having to keep two copies of transactions, one in excel to track the various projects, and one in Wave which is our official source of accounts.

We have been evaluating alternative solutions, but before we make the decision to move away from Wave (a platform that has served us so well) can we please get a firm Yes/No if Projects or Tags are in the roadmap of features, and if so what is the timeline for implementation?

I represent a USA based non profit, and tags/classes are a major need and every single scenario given above is a valid reason. I wanted to through in an additional scenario from my own perspective.

Much of our funding is receved via grants, and these grants are specific to one or multipe [rpgrams we provide. WIthout tags/classes there is no easy way to idenetify what item is used for what program and in turn what source of funds are used. When we receive funds they are deposited in to the master checking account with other funds, but when we run reports we have to know what was spent in what program.

There are two ways I have found around this, but they are extremely tedious.
First way was to create customer entry for each program/grant provider. This works only because we don't have "customers" that we sell to.

The other LONG method is to create a master COA and then duplicate it for each program. As you can imagine this is tedious, creating multiple fail points during audits and accounting, and I imagine this would create a tremendous amount of bloat on your own databases.

Wave Accounting is the closest to an easy to use and efficient accounting product I have found that does not cost an arm and a leg which is critical for a non profit. We are aware that Quickbooks has a tag/class method, but really do not have the funds to spend on such a specialized product. Doing so reduces the amount we can assist our clients.

One piece of suggestion while implementing the feature:
Assign the tag/class feature to an line, not an entire transaction.
For Example: we pay salaries out of program funds and admin funds depending on the job that is done. An individual person can work in multiple programs. Instead of printing indvidual checks for each program, we can split the check for each amount and assign a tag to that line. Example Transaction:
- Executive $ 150 from administration funds
- Driver $85 from client transport program
Total Check: $235

Hey @jpo - unfortunately we don't have a hard answer on yes or no, or a firm timeline at this time. Conversations are happening internally though; we've had a ton of feedback about the use cases for this, and how it would be beneficial for our customers and our product. Priorities are still being set (and shifted where need be), but the focus of our teams internally right now has been to bring everyone over to our newest platform. A major part of this has been building out and upgrading the current reconciliation feature as it stands, so that customers used to workflows in our older platform experience a smoother transition to updated workflows.

Another major project that has taken priority is updates to our system to remain tax compliant for our UK users. Once both of these projects have been fully realized, our teams will have more capacity for tackling other projects, including taking a better look at how we could implement tagging, if we are able to. We will also be in a better place then to give a firmer answer in terms of both certainty and timelines of such a project. Thank you for your feedback however, and I apologize that this current limitation is greatly effecting Wave's usability for you and your business.

Hey @jmiller_meaewellness, first off, thank you so much for taking the time to offer your workaround, I am sure that this will be really helpful to a lot of users in the meantime! Your post also provides us with really great context, which is something our Product Team loves!

This feature is something that is on the radar, I assure you and just as Charlotte said, we will update all communications once there is any movement! Thanks,

@Zoe_caff This is great...am very glad to hear a company acknowledgement that this essential feature is now on the radar. When eventually introduced this'll make Wave a way more useful business tool...I just hope the timescale is sooner rather than later?

I am adding my voice to the request for a tag/classes/categories feature. I represent an education support academy, and we have three main revenue streams. I would love to be able to class customers according to type so I can apply a filter to invoices.

I understand that we all benefit tremendously from Wave as a free service and cannot thank you guys enough for all the hard work and the great product you give us, but I will be waiting patiently for the feature to be added in the near future.